The open online course movement has taken off in a big way this year, but until now it has been limited mainly to elite universities that have struck partnerships with open-course platforms such as Coursera or edX.

Now, with the the launch of a new open online course network from Instructure, maker of the open-source, cloud-based learning management system (LMS) Canvas, anyone with internet access will be able to enroll in online courses.

The Canvas Network, which allows institutions of any size to offer their online courses built with the Canvas LMS to students worldwide free of charge, will debut in January 2013 with more than 20 free courses offered by a dozen schools across America—including two community colleges.

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The six technologies and the changes they’re expected to bring are detailed in “NMC Horizon Report: 2014 Higher Education Edition,” a 52-page document that is available free from the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative, which convened the panel.

Some Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) attract hundreds of thousands of students from all over the world. Read about the 5 best free ones.

Fe Angela M. Verzosa's insight:

Online education has existed for a while now, but has really taken off in the past year. Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, as they are referred to, have refueled an interest in higher education like never before, with some courses attracting hundreds of thousands of students of all ages from all over the world. Read the best 5 free MOOCs here: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/229640-5-best-moocs-for-free-online-higher-education/

A survey asked U.S. college students about the future of learning. What they revealed could affect education strategy, particularly planners and learning professionals as they think about how to best engage and attract this next generation to both their face-to-face and virtual offerings. "The future of education is online, and since they were brought up with the internet, they are prepared for that change,” said Dan Schawbel, founder of Millennial Branding, in a press release. “Education should not be a one size fits all model because everyone learns differently, regardless of age, occupation, and location. More online courses should be offered to cater to those who learn better in a virtual classroom.” Survey respondents said that they are more willing to learn online and that they view the future of learning as more virtual and social media driven. However, 78 percent still think that it’s easier to learn in a traditional classroom than online. More here: http://associationsnow.com/2013/06/the-future-of-learning-according-to-millennials/

Fe Angela M. Verzosa's insight:

From the survey response, more and more college students believe that the future of education is online. Do you agree?

A few high-profile rejections have done nothing to doom the future of massive open online courses (MOOCs), according to a worldwide report.

Providing access to MOOCs, in fact, is considered a necessary shift in the ever-changing higher education landscape.

Amherst College offered a firm denial to MOOC provider EdX in April. Duke faculty, a few weeks later, voted down plans for the university to offer MOOC-like courses. Philosophy faculty members at San Jose State University, where MOOCs have thrived, said in an open letter that adopting MOOCs was tantamount to watering down students’ college education.

The willingness to use MOOCs as a means of expanding higher education and lowering student costs is hardly shared by most colleges and universities worldwide, according to a report from Enterasys, a networking company that works with higher education.

Forty-three percent of respondents to Enterasys’s survey said they planned on offering some MOOC courses by 2016, marking a significant jump from the 14 percent of institutions that offer MOOC courses today. Less than half of the schools that plan on offering MOOCs by 2016 will accept course credit from those classes, according to the report.

Fe Angela M. Verzosa's insight:

The expansion of MOOC offerings is expected to coincide with consistent growth of online education, as 90 percent of schools said they’d offer web-based classes by 2016, an increase of 17 percent of the 73 percent of colleges that offer online options today.

Coursera announced Thursday that it was partnering with 10 state university systems and public flagship institutions -- and that the universities could offer the online courses for credit.

The universities involved in the new partnerships are State University of New York (SUNY), the Tennessee Board of Regents and University of Tennessee systems, the University of Colorado system, the University of Houston system, University of Kentucky, University of Nebraska, University of New Mexico, the university system of Georgia, and West Virginia University.

While the exact details of each deal differ depending on the institution, the central goal of the arrangements are similar.

“At the core of these partnerships is the motivation to encourage new methods and enhance previous approaches to teaching both on-campus and online,” Coursera stated. “Faculty teaching at these institutions will have the opportunity to develop online courses as well as adapt existing MOOC content, which they can then incorporate into their own classrooms.”

Fe Angela M. Verzosa's insight:

Check out how Coursera’s partnership with public universities changes the MOOC landscape.

College students of every kind spend an inordinate amount of time on the internet, but engineering and technology students take the proverbial web-surfing cake.

Past research has shown that college students can't spend much time without checking texts and social media accounts, and this new survey shows which students are spending the most time on the internet, and which social media is used across the 26 countries represented in the findings.

About one-fourth of social science students were reportedly spending more than five hours online every day. Students interested in arts and humanities were least likely to spend more than five hours a day online, as compared to technology and engineering students who are most likely to spend more than five hours a day online.

Europeans, Americans, and Canadians were most likely to use Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks to “keep up to date,” while Latin American and African respondents were less likely to use social media for this reason.the top reasons Americans use Facebook and Twitter.

Once regarded as a passing fad, social media is now an essential language that today’s college students—and officials—must learn in order to remain relevant and well-informed.

The University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research recently surveyed numerous four-year accredited U.S. colleges and universities to assess the use of social media in higher education. The survey infograph illustrates how universities use social media in multiple ways and shows social media’s surge in popularity in the last three academic years.

The infograph also listed the three greatest successes and challenges to using social media in higher education.

Most administrators agree that safe communities created within social media—how professors can link students to course materials via monitored virtual environments—is a positive movement. Social media also encourages collaboration among students and professors, and it gives them opportunities to produce good content and further market a university’s unique fingerprint and identity.

The power of funding alone should not be enough to override academic freedom, argues Curt Rice, nor does open access automatically skew the world of scholarship

The best argument that open access enhances academic freedom lies in the fact that in open access journals, authors retain copyrights while in the traditional system, they must sign over the copyright to the publisher. Stuart Shieber at Harvard University elaborates: "Traditional publishing infringes academic freedom. Authors assign copyright to publishers as part of the publication process. With this control, publishers can and do limit access to the scholar's writing. Scholars are therefore not free to disseminate their academic work in the broadest way."

There is a growing literature suggesting that open access articles are read and cited more, another argument that open access enhances academic freedom. Also, open access articles are assured of being archived and available for longer access in the future, unlike commercial digital publishing where the responsibility for archiving lies with the publisher who decides until when to keep archived articles available. The library that subscribes to an electronically published traditional journal cannot simply keep an archive of what it subscribes to. After all, isn't academic freedom about the right of published works to remain accessible for as long as it takes?

The two dominant audiences for college websites are prospective students—defined as high school juniors and seniors—and current college students who are searching for support during their experience. A recent Ektron infograph offers insight into the different ways these two student groups locate and are influenced by college information.

According to research, college websites are one of the most influential resources for prospective students, second only to a campus tour; friends and family and guidance counselors ranked as the third and fourth most influential resources.

While Open Access (OA) journals have expanded the reach of scholarship, some of these journals have questionable credentials. Be wary of spam emails soliciting submissions; learn how to distinguish between reputable and predatory journals. Check the latest Beall's list.

According to a new infographic, online courses provide many new advantages that are propelling online learning past “trend” to mainstay.

Fe Angela M. Verzosa's insight:

Whether you oppose, support, or are merely ambivalent to the practice of online learning, the proliferation in the number of colleges and universities offering blended and online learning courses skyrocketing, reinforcing the fact that online learning is not a fad, but here to stay. This infographic details the many advantages of online learning, outside of just convenience.

If your university memories comprise dull, dusty halls and cold, concrete classrooms, you probably didn't study at these places

Fe Angela M. Verzosa's insight:

The 10 buildings include Lomonosov Moscow State University, the world's tallest university building; Swanston Academic Building in Australia, which "catches the eye with its wavy and jagged façade"; and Bradfield Hall at Cornell University in the United States, which is "almost entirely windowless." But my favorite is the image here of the library at Freie Universitat Berlin. Even though it appears to be part of the existing buildings, the library was conceived as a single building.

As the new year begins, Pearson's Dr. Jeff D. Borden outlines his top 7 ed-tech predictions for higher education in 2014.

Fe Angela M. Verzosa's insight:

Here are 7 things blogged about regularly, formally written about in education publications, the subject of grants and other financial opportunities, and represented in numerous conference presentation titles.

The American Historical Association has released a policy calling on history departments and university libraries to allow students to place embargoes on the online versions of Ph.D. dissertations in the field for up to six years. The association says that such a policy is needed to enable new Ph.D.s to successfully publish books based on their dissertations. But some historians are upset about the proposal, which they say isn't needed and runs counter to the scholarly mission of sharing research findings.

Historically, doctoral granting institutions have required copies of dissertations to be placed in the university library, so these documents have not been embargoed. But most of these library shelves haven't attracted much foot traffic, let alone the kind of traffic that digital copies enable. More recently, many universities have embraced some or all of the open access movement, requiring digital copies to be made available.

"History has been and remains a book-based discipline, and the requirement that dissertations be published online poses a tangible threat to the interests and careers of junior scholars in particular," the statement says. "Many universities award tenure only to those junior faculty who have published a monograph within six years of receiving the Ph.D. With the online publication of dissertations, historians will find it increasingly difficult to persuade publishers to make the considerable capital investments necessary to the production of scholarly monographs."

Much of the debate that has turned up online about the proposed policy focuses on whether the AHA is exaggerating the danger to new Ph.D.s of having their dissertations online.

Because Ph.D. theses are increasingly freely and widely available in digital repositories, journal and book publishers are not likely to accept work based on digitally available dissertations. Will embargo as an option answers the nagging academic issue of the faculty - "Publish or perish."

The not-for-profit massive open online course (MOOC) platform EdX roped in its first Asian institutions, along with more Ivy League universities, as the number of participating schools doubled May 21.

EdX’s educational partners doubled on Tuesday, as Ivy League schools and prestigious universities from Asia and Europe joined the not-for-profit MOOC platform that has stirred debate about the future of higher education. There are now more than 900,000 students taking EdX courses.

EdX, which will also feature classes from new educational partners from Europe, including Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium, the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, and the Technical University of Munich in Germany, made the announcement weeks after philosophy professors at the San Jose State University (SJSU) criticized EdX courses in an open letter, saying that such courses were inferior to traditional classes.

The new EdX insititutions are expected to begin offering classes on the platform in late 2013 or early 2014.

Fe Angela M. Verzosa's insight:

Bringing online courses from Berklee College of Music, Boston University, Davidson College, and University of Washington, along with Peking University in China, The University of Hong Kong, and other Asian institutions brings the number of EdX online schools to 27 just one year after the Cambridge-based outfit launched. There are now more than 900,000 students taking EdX courses, some for college credit.

The battle for and against massive open online courses (MOOCs) rages on as we head into summer, with new arguments emerging on both sides of the MOOC divide.

A newly released infographic provides intriguing breakdowns of how MOOCs are being used -- and will be used -- in higher education, how people feel about the emerging technology, and the biggest value and drawbacks of the massive open online courses. The infographic sheds more light on how many colleges and universities might offer credit-bearing MOOC classes.

This infographic provides intriguing breakdowns of how MOOCs are being used -- and will be used -- in higher education, how people feel about the emerging technology, and the biggest value and drawbacks of the massive open online courses.

Some of the most popular tools that are revolutionizing the educational field and not only are the so called “collaborative learning tools”.

If your main educational purpose is to increase student involvement and collaboration, then you may want to consider a mind mapping application as a collaborative learning tool option.

What are the benefits of using a mind mapping tool for your teaching activity?

A mind mapping tool creates the right context where students can develop their critical thinking, creativity, independent thought process and teamwork skills.

When engaging in collaboration using a mind mapping software, there are several benefits that have a great impact on the learner as he interacts with others and discovers different ways of managing new information and content:

Beginning May 8, instructors providing Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) via Coursera will have the option to supplement their video lectures with content from major academic publishers Cengage Learning, Macmillan Higher Education, Oxford University Press, SAGE Publications,and Wiley, at no cost to their students.

And that’s just the beginning: “Coursera is also actively discussing pilot agreements and related alliances with Springer and additional publishers,” the company said in a statement.

Fe Angela M. Verzosa's insight:

This is an interesting development because most MOOC instructors rely on open access or public domain resources for readings.

Through a newly launched mobile application, voters can now try filling out a sample ballot, learn more about campaign rules, find their precinct, and report campaign violations through their cellphones, tablets and desktops.

Fe Angela M. Verzosa's insight:

This is a free app, and works well if you have a strong internet connection. Try it.

In this free eBook from The eLearning Guild, experts provide 129 tips for educators and designers who want to make the best use of these technologies.

Virtual classrooms can be daunting. How do you engage students you can’t see? What if someone’s network or Internet connection drops or is slow? How do you select the appropriate virtual-classroom (or virtual-world) platform?

In this free eBook from The eLearning Guild, experts provide 129 tips for educators and designers who want to make the best use of these technologies. Whether you are brand new tovirtual classrooms and virtual worlds or have been working with them for a while, you should find something in here for you, in areas including:

Wikipedia editors have raised concerns about a University of Toronto psychology professor after he assigned 1,900 students to add content to the free online encyclopedia.

A University of Toronto psychology class assignment created a stir among Wikipedia volunteer editors who complained when more than 900 students added content to the online encyclopedia. Wikipedia editors complained that the students were not properly editing the site’s pages using the necessary citations for each tidbit of information added to an entry. Do you think this will have a lasting impact in the way educators use Wikipedia for classroom assignments?

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